So I’m largely the reason Band of Horses are still able to play music today. Kind of.

With even more enthusiasm I endorse Heypenny for Gospel Most Worth Spreading. Sure, everyone who reads this likely already know what’s up, and my enjoyment of their music is nearly a given because of some friendly history: The drummer trained me as a projectionist at the cinemas and I now owe him a great deal of gratitude for putting me in a position to know a good chunk of my favorite people.

But I had seen them at Bonnaroo and come away impressed, and on a Saturday when I thought I needed to forget a few things, having a night where I could dance as gracelessly as I wanted—I mean to say having a night where a lot of those same people would all be under the same roof without a marriage or funeral to commemorate felt a little like my version of a room at the top of the world, or, um, the South side of Evansville.

Really, anything—any band anyway—that can get me unabashedly waving my ring finger in the air while yelling as loud as I can along to Beyonce—if you like me enough claim me—can’t be remembered as anything other than joyous liberation. We came, we drank, we danced, and then most importantly we all got home safe with a few memories or at least some photographs.

Also, no one threw up in my car.

Looking out my office window into the fishbowl world, I saw a girl who looked straight up like Melissa. (Have I mentioned Melissa my sistah moved to Erie here? Because she did, “She’s Leaving Home” style. Okay, maybe not that dramatic.) She had the same long lithe body and Melissa’s London bob with bangs haircut. And I never saw her face, so the illusion was complete and subtly heartbreaking

because I realized how much I miss her when I felt my legs push my whole heart towards a doppelganger and a disappearing smile spread across my face and my hand reach for the doorknob that would open the door that would open up a memory of my sister coming to visit me at the cinemas to just talk and hang out, or see a movie, or maybe get some brotherly support. I was standing stranded between my chair and the door when I remembered I needed to turn around and sit down; there wasn’t anyone outside who would smile at the sight of me.

Which is to say recently I’ve been the kind of person to miss the people who’ve moved on.

My own Captain Smith course correction fortunately met with better success. I stepped a few inches in front of an all black snake with yellow markings on the underside of its face. “Oh, Amy, do you see that?”

She did. It recoiled, drew tight to strike. I was too close and stepped back slowly. Amy extended her hand to pick the damn thing up and it retreated down a snake hole. We considered her flip flops and the exposed soft skin of her feet. We felt lucky. We wondered whether it was poisonous. It was. She asked whether I would suck out the venom. I said I had my pocket knife and would open a small incision near the bite through which to suck the poisonous venom from her bloodstream* because I am a wilderness man with full, hearty beard.

This all occurred about midway through a busy day full of aimless adventure Amy and I had (not) planned. We had decided to meet up at ten in the morning, which admittedly isn’t gonna help me see a farmer’s sunrise by any stretch, but it’s still early enough that my cinema schedule conflicts. Pity me.

Worse yet, I couldn’t fall asleep the night before. Every few months or so for a night or two, my bed feels more like quicksand than a cloud. It’s a strange occurrence, all of a sudden finding my bed so uncomfortable, and for whatever reason, when I feel like that, there’s just no way for me to fall asleep in my bed. I twist and turn in bed as though I’ve had about five bourbon and cokes and some pretty girl has roped me onto the dance floor.

After an hour or so of futilely trying to fall asleep in bed, I decided to go out to my car, get my sleeping bag, and sleep on the floor of my room. I fell asleep quickly, but my alarm came too soon, and I hadn’t left myself enough time for hitting snooze.

There could be a moral about getting out of bed being the first step towards success, but I don’t think that’s exactly something with which ninety-nine percent of people struggle. But I made it to Poseyville on time and spent a good six hours or so doing what I normally spend my time doing by myself with someone—someone with whom I spent the entire six hours talking about this and that. It was refreshing.

We drove to a state fish and wildlife area, wandered a state nature preserve (Twin Swamps was where we found the snake on a path), saw three rivers, stumbled upon the site of a recent homicide, explored utopia, looked for old churches, and I’m still leaving things out.

Pretty simply, this is why I’m thankful for the friends with whom I’ve been smart enough to surround myself. We all have wheels and open hearts ready for easy adventures and mouths full of words and ears like baskets.

Everything anyone is willing to share with me is my harvest, my bounty. This is how I nourish myself.

*(This is apparently a terrible idea. So don’t do it. darlingdisasters.com remains your one stop shop for first aid information.)

At one point, a kid, maybe five or six with short white straw hair, had to go the bathroom and was looking for a buddy to accompany him. They’re instructed by the counselors to go in pairs.

In my mind, I’d trust one kid alone more than I’d trust two. One kid just wants to be taken care of, whether he can do that for himself or needs the help of someone more able, it doesn’t matter. One kid is all business, focused on the task at hand, whether it be coloring or plain not listening to anyone old enough to know better.

But two kids kids are a conspiracy, all double dares, escalation, and trouble. Two kids scheme. One kid hits another, and the wronged kid complains loudly, citing inalienable rights to a particular spot on the bus.

Maybe in the same way that one death is a tragedy and several are a statistic, losing one kid is sheer negligence, but a few more, say two or three, that’s just horribly fucking tragic. Who can prevent  something like that? So it’s almost like a free pass. You might note that I’m not a parent or responsible for much of anything.

Anyway, the boy was having trouble finding a bathroom buddy, and I broke off from conversation with Melissa to offer to take him. On the way to bathroom, he looked up at me, and with all the kindness and sincerity he could he muster—which I have to imagine was every last drop in his tiny little heart—said, “Meester Jason, you are berry nice.”

I smiled back at him and told him I thought it was very nice of him to say so. Then he took casually took my hand and looked ahead again in the same motion. I felt like the most important person in Evansville.

The lesson here is that yeah, this kid was too dumb to know I’m not really all that great. It’s also that we have to learn to search for the negative in people. I attribute his earnestness to his youth, that he’s never been hurt or disappointed. He assumed the goodness in me; it took so little for his faith in me and humanity and the camp counselors to be confirmed. I can’t quite imagine I’d feel the same way about someone offering to take me to the bathroom.

He told me that he had trouble getting his swim trunks up and down, and as best I could, I tried to relate, “Well, yeah, wet clothes are hard to get off.” I reminded him to wash his hands, and then we were off to the next adventure.

Jumping in the pool, one kid came up to me and wanted to be held. I obliged. Another kid, sensing that I was a monster or a jungle gym, grabbed onto my free arm. A third kid, seeing what was so fun for two might be pretty spectacular for three, found a spot too. In this way I attracted maybe ten or so kids, more than I could every imagine carrying, all hanging off me or at least hanging off another kid with a better spot. I felt strong. I played at being a monster, and they played at being the conquering Lilliputians. Occasionally I’d fall down to give them a sense of accomplishment, sinking them with me like a selfish ship.

The game lasted as long as I could endure and eventually evolved into my running up and down the shallow end with a kid holding onto each arm. I’d run up, I’d run back, and then I’d take a new two. I felt like I had invented a roller coaster, or a space ship to the moon.

Lesson being, if you get a chance to sit it out or gang tackle your camp director’s brother, I hope you gang tackle your camp director’s brother. Something fun enough for one person is usually fun enough for two—so on and so forth.

When the afternoon came to an end, when I couldn’t tell whether the redness on my shoulders was from the sun or the hands with nails of grabby children, the kids all gathered under the shade of a few trees to wait for the bus. They formed lines grouped by their ages, and I sat down next to the middle group, maybe the six- and seven-year-olds. (I am terrible at telling how old kids are. They’re all five to me.)

They talked to me like they had known me forever, and a red headed boy and girl laid their heads down in my lap. A fifth grade girl gave me a hug and asked when she would get to see me again. (Uh, no.)

Maybe I cheated by showing up and being responsible for nothing other than having fun with the kids. But I think I learned to always measure myself but how children see and respond to me, and for one Thursday afternoon, I was the tallest man on Earth.

She doesn’t eat that kinda stuff. Too much red meat, too much fat, too much McDonald’s. I tried to hold back my disappointment

but it sprang forth, “Well, would you get one for me, eat it, and let me know how it tastes?” If I remember correctly, we were driving around getting high at the time.

“Jason, that’s [just] weird.” Rather than asking to live vicariously through someone else’s taste buds, I should’ve been wishing I was born vegetarian; I should’ve wished against being given a choice. Instead I asked Dave the same question the next day when we were all out at a bar; he said he really enjoyed it. After returning home that same night, I got online and searched for burger reviews. The taste and texture of the thing was compared to dry meat loaf.

My curiosity was sated. My appetite (for destruction!) never is.

It’s been anywhere from three to six months (I’ve a terrible memory and an even worse sense of timelines) I’ve been on this, my second lacto-ovo kick. I’ve broken once on bacon cheese fries; it was the day I got my last grad school rejection letter and was just more frustrated than usual with the cinemas. I’ve been tempted pretty much every day.

While I could extol the virtues of this dietary choice all the live long blog—I poop like a motherfucking champ these days—this is more about dealing with that temptation.

Mentally, I keep a regular sized mason jar next to my bed. I try to put everything bad I do and I especially try to put everything bad I do to myself in it, but it’s only so big, it can only hold so much. I’ll put picking at my cuticles in, but eating the entire tin of cookies is going to have to come out. I’ll try to cram in the people that are bad for me, but I’m going to have to shake everything out onto my bed so I can get to the low self-esteem at the bottom. In and out it goes like this; I always see the jar as half full of bullshit ’cause I’m an optimist. Robin likes to joke and call me King Louis.

For whatever reason, I’ve been especially down on myself recently. I’d share the symptoms but it’d get depressing quickly. But I needed a change, so I gave the jar a good cocktail mixer rattle and hoped the contents would shake down and settle during shipping. There ended up being far less space than I had hoped.

But being a good man means being a good packer means finding a way to cram as much into as small a space as possible—you should’ve see my car when I was moving back and forth between Butler for Summers off. After taking inventory of all the things I wish I could cut out of my life, I decided that maybe the biggest thing should be what I put back in first.

So for not nearly long enough, I’ve not smoked any weed. It fit in the jar like a boulder, and I chipped the rim a little cramming it in there. But during the time all my pot’s been in storage, a lot of my littler self-inflicted problems have turned to sand, and now they fit more easily into the in between spaces—and maybe, ideally anyway, they’re wearing down the bigger things, eroding them.

I don’t really believe in forever, so I’m not saying this is going to last or making any promises. This good mood rising could just as easily be my body’s reaction, a flooding of feel good hormones that’ll subside, but saying I feel pretty clear headed will suffice.

Oh, and my sex drive has been through the roof.

The names on my BlackBerry call log are sorted by the total time I spend in conversation with each person; it feels just so practical and rewarding to see the people I talk to most on top. Natasha Messnered (without oxygen? —ed. [isn’t the —ed. thing just such a cliche now? —ed.) up to that summit however long ago, and very monk-like hasn’t come down from that particular peak even though we haven’t talked in like (a) months. It seems so long. I would have replaced her by now if—well, a lot of things.

But a week or so ago Sarah called, and we talked and listened for about half an hour. When I said goodbye and my phone went back to the call log Natasha had been replaced. Finally? Forever? I wanted to bellow over my alphorn, “Girl, I’m gone for good.” I was too proud of such an insignificant moment for it to last long.

So I sat down to carve ‘Tash a letter into stone because the best way for me to process my emotions is to inflict them on other people. I told her that when she felt alone, there was someone who wanted to be by her side even when he knew he shouldn’t. That if she wanted to know whether she was pretty, there was someone who would be unspeakably happy swimming in the sweet blue pools of her eyes. That sort of stuff. I ended it on a bittersweet note, a bit of a fuck her: She’s missing out on this, me.

I’m not very good at the bravado thing though, and I didn’t even manage to convince myself; I didn’t mail any of it. I gave up on sending her any sort of anything at that particular time and tried to quiet the urge to give our finality some more finality. Tried repeating “I better be quiet now” as a prayer.

When I walked down from Maudlin Mountain to dip my toes in the grassy meadow that laps at the foothills (or go to work or something), I realized the tablets I carried with me were blank. What’s so wrong with wanting some scribbled down meaning to go with all the people spinning in and out of my life?

My father peeled off the rough spun cotton sweater he was wearing at the time and swaddled me in it. He held me close to him, and from what I’ve been told, the love in his blue eyes burned the clouds away. He got the sun; all he left me with was an aspersion to itchy clothes, situations, and people.

Anyway, my family and I (henceforth referred to as we) commemorate this day by the giving of sweaters. I have a sweater for every year I’ve been trying to feed from the great buffet of life, which is to say I have too many fucking sweaters. Closets and drawers and armoires all teeming with sweaters, a lot of very earnest, well meaning sweaters. Having a Fall birthday ain’t all that.

This year, I told myself, would be different. I filed all the appropriate forms to get my gray October birthday (term used loosely) adjusted to a day in July when the sun would burn bright enough that nothing but shorts and well-ventilated polos would be comfortable enough for living and dancing.

So on this past Friday, with the money Mom had given me for my new fake birthday, I set out to Edinburgh, Indiana to buy some new clothes at an outlet mall. I drove my car there alone. I brought a bag of weed.

Someone had cared enough to inform everyone  and everything ahead of me that I’d be passing by soon. Driving through Hoosier National Forest, fallen trees knew something that those still rooted clearly did not. The chosen few lie prostrate at the side of the road, and let their long, dry hair wave like palm leaves in the wind of passing cars and progress. I can’t say I’ve ever met more polite, deferential trees, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the other wayfarers I let travel beside, behind, and beyond me mistook them as sad casualties of some stormy Indiana Summer storm, but I’m not the type to correct anyone.

Farther on and caught in construction traffic, I felt the orange stares of tanned men. Their barrels slowed me to a pace I wouldn’t mind while still giving them the chance to see my face well enough to wonder as I passed how brightly my eyes gleamed and which direction they pointed under my black Wayfarers. I have to think it was all intentional, planned.

Clearly, this was shaping up to be my day.

And so every time some poor, minimum wage girl brought me shorts in a different size than what I had selected to my fitting room I felt fortunate. Every time the forty percent discount was applied to an already discounted article of clothing, I felt like a son of Abraham. I’m an easy guy to please; my mood times two pairs of shorts, three shirts, and a pair of pants equaled quiet satisfaction worth sharing. I can’t say that any of those clothes really matched, but I’m happy with what I bought.

On the way home, I stopped by Bloomington to visit a head shop and buy a new spoon and some glass bead filters.

By tonight, I was trying to find some activity to pass the evening. I decided to use the money I had budgeted to replace the weed that had run out to instead buy some odds and ends. Without any cash allocated to buy anything to smoke, I felt oddly liberated. I smiling bought a new toothbrush and various hygiene products to replenish my dopp bag. I asked Carrie for the name of the vintner she liked so I could buy a bottle or two of good wine.

I finished a bottle of Argentinean Malbec and sat down to write this silly little thing. I had cicadas for a chorus and a glowing Weber grill for my star. I can’t say that any of this matched, but I’m happy with what I wrought.

That was kind of neat.

And while I was at the library or so an hour before that, and I found a brand new baseball in the parking lot.

Coincidence?

Someday I’ll tell a pretty gal “I want to be your medicine/ I want to feed the sparrow in your heart,” and hopefully she won’t have any idea what I’m on about and be impressed by the artful way I express myself. And then maybe I’ll win the lotto.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of The National. The Virginia EP and Boxer.

I’d like to be brand new to some lady, and we could sit in the hallway, sharing a pair of white headphones and waiting to be called inside the warm, wood-paneled room. We’re in mono; she and I, our voices sound the same no matter how you listen.

Three months later:

• Taking a big ol’ celery shit right now. Really. At work. Second stall. On my BlackBerry. Lord, this is inane. I quit. Wakka wakka wakka 140.
• Fun fact: I actually signed up for Twitter to help me count characters. I regret it already.